Justice denied

Ray Towler

After my whiny little diatribe against the courts triggered by the partial refund of a parking ticket, along comes a riveting magazine article to put me in my place.

The March issue of Esquire tells the story of Ray Towler, an ordinary guy who's living in Cleveland back in September 1981 when he's hauled into court to stand trial on charges of rape, kidnapping and felonious assault, all relating to an attack on an 11-year-old girl in a local park.

He's got an iron-clad alibi but, you see, he's black. And two sketchy witnesses claim it was him who they saw. Writer-at-large Mike Sager puts us in the courtroom:

"Raymond Daniel Towler is sitting at the defense table. He is a big guy, twenty-four years old, with a full puffy beard and a quick smile; his burnished ebony skin is a shade darker than the rich wood paneling in the courtroom. By most accounts he is a gentle, talented, thoughtful man who studied art in community college. He earns a living working temp jobs and lending his Jimi Hendrix-inspired guitar stylings to various rock bands around town. At the time of his arrest, he was collecting unemployment, thinking about reenlisting in the Army. He was living with his mother and little sister in a modest house on the west side, three miles from the Valley, a place he's been going with relatives and friends his entire life. 

"Ray Towler does not claim to be the best man on the planet. He's really just a regular guy. Though he doesn't drink, he does enjoy the occasional doobie — it is 1981, after all, and he is a musician. He has yet to find a regular civilian job. You could say he's always been a little bit adrift — a black kid in a white school who wanted to be an engineer or an astronaut but who was counseled toward shop classes and the assembly line; a volunteer soldier who was told he could learn how to work on missiles but ended up in the infantry; a veteran with an honorable discharge who served overseas and then came back home to ... the same old shit he was trying to escape.

"One thing he is absolutely sure of: He is no child molester."

Inevitably, Towler is convicted and sent away to prison. He spends nearly 30 years locked up, despite numerous appeals. Finally, in late 2008, a lab comes back with results showing he was almost certainly not the rapist.

Sager does a masterful job telling the story of a wrongful conviction -- a story we've seen too often involving mostly African American men -- and describing Towler's re-entry into a civilian world that has changed in every conceivable way while he's been imprisoned for 28 years, 8 months.

Read the article and you'll be outraged. And, in my case, ashamed to be caught complaining about a parking citation. 

"The Someone You're Not"